Research grants management software trusted by clients for 20+ years
Radically improve the efficiency of your research funding process, and have more time to focus on the impact of your grants.
Overcome research grants management challenges with SmartSimple Software
Reduced administrative burden
Efficient review process
Adaptability and resilience
Data-driven decision making
Manage your entire research grant lifecycle with SmartSimple
Program/call setup
Efficient application intake and review
Award setup
Post-award reporting
Measuring impact and reporting
Effective budget management
Discover SmartSimple Cloud for Research Grants Management's modules
Program/call setup
SmartSimple's Research Grants Management System, with its powerful Program Manager, offers a comprehensive solution to help funders streamline new and existing Program or Call Setup processes.
Customize programs to your needs
- Create and manage your existing or new grant programs tailored to your specific requirements. Whether it's fellowships, basic research funding, special projects, or applied research, you can build these programs to match their complexities.
- Add multiple characteristics to your grant programs, such as multi-stage application requirements, multi-year funding schedules, and even requirements like ethics board approvals. This flexibility ensures your grants align perfectly with your mission.
- Enhance your screening process with user-friendly eligibility quizzes tailored to each grant program.
Effortlessly monitor programs
- Effortlessly stay on top of each program milestone, payment target, and outcomes report, whether you're managing single-stage applications or complex, multi-stage, multi-year initiatives.
- Automated workflows help you save time and effort by automating administrative tasks. This not only increases efficiency but also ensures that no critical steps are overlooked.
- Monitor the efficiency of your programs and screening processes, enabling data-driven improvements to enhance your overall grant management experience.
Boost collaboration and control
- Ensure precise control and data security over user access by assigning programs to specific teams or departments with customized view and edit permissions.
- Have greater control over stakeholder participation, encouraging more effective collaboration among your teams and departments.
- Efficiently route applications to departments of your choice, ensuring that the most qualified teams handle reviews, thus optimizing the decision-making process.
Application intake and review
SmartSimple's Research Grants Management System empowers funders with the tools and capabilities they need to streamline Application Intake and Review processes. With efficient reviewer management, sophisticated scoring methodology, and seamless coordination, funders can make more informed funding decisions and support impactful research initiatives.
Efficient Reviewer Management
- Leverage your reviewers expertise for a more effective and transparent review process. The system centralizes and consolidates contact profiles, streamlining the recruitment of reviewers for specific applications based on their profile criteria.
- Utilize the powerful Attribute Matching feature to quickly identify reviewers that match your specific criteria, saving you a significant amount of time in the reviewer selection process.
- You can recruit and assign reviewers based on your own criteria, including subject matter expertise and conflicts of interest, ensuring that the most qualified reviewers are assessing each application.
Enhance Collaboration
For Internal Staff: Real-time Access and Updates: Team members can access and update information in real-time, facilitating better communication and coordination. This is particularly beneficial in cases where multiple staff members are responsible for different aspects of grant management, ensuring that everyone is working with the most current data and progress can be monitored effectively.
For Applicants/Grantees: Collaborative Workspaces: Applicants and grantees have the ability to invite others to work on their grant applications and submit post-award reports. This collaborative feature fosters transparency and teamwork among applicants and their partners, making it easier to gather necessary information and submit comprehensive grant proposals and reports.
Sophisticated Scoring Methodology
- SmartSimple's Committee Manager allows you to make better funding decisions by capturing every key element of your scoring rubric authentically. This information is tracked within the system, providing a comprehensive overview of each application's strengths and weaknesses.
- Create multiple scoring rubrics across your programs, applying different weightings, scorecard questions, and reviewer types. This flexibility ensures that your scoring methodology aligns perfectly with your grant programs' objectives.
- Efficiently organize reviewer participation with assigned reviewer types, whether primary or secondary, streamlining the flow of the review stages and ensuring a coordinated and timely review process.
Seamless Reviewer Coordination
- SmartSimple's Committee Manager facilitates efficient reviewer organization, making the review process more seamless and coordinated. Assigned reviewer types, such as primary or secondary, help manage the flow of the review stages in less time.
- Keep reviewers organized and on top of their assigned applications through a simple interface, triggered reminders, and clear deadlines. This feature ensures that reviewers stay on track and that reviews are completed in a timely manner.
- Split applications across multiple review committees, ideal for organizations with more complex review processes. This enables a more specialized and focused approach to evaluating grant applications.
Award setup
SmartSimple's Research Grants Management System empowers funders in the Award Setup process by offering a range of features that enhance efficiency, compliance, and transparency. With capabilities for establishing legal frameworks, customizing payment schedules, and streamlining reporting requirements, funders can ensure a smooth and effective management of grant awards.
Efficient legal framework
- With SmartSimple, you can establish a solid legal framework for grant award agreements. The system allows you to create, manage, and store all necessary legal documents and contracts digitally, ensuring transparency and compliance.
- You can streamline the contract negotiation process by facilitating electronic signatures, reducing paperwork and the need for physical document exchange.
- SmartSimple's document management capabilities enable funders to easily access and reference agreements, making it simpler to enforce the terms and conditions of grants.
Custom payment schedule
- You can set up payment schedules with precision, tailoring them to the specific requirements of each grant program. Whether you need to disburse funds in installments, lump sums, or at specific project milestones, SmartSimple's flexibility accommodates your needs.
- The system automates payment disbursements, ensuring timely and accurate fund transfers, reducing administrative overhead and the risk of errors.
- Tracking and monitoring payments become effortless, allowing funders to stay on top of financial commitments and ensuring that grant recipients receive the necessary funding when they need it.
Streamlined reporting requirements
The Grant Budget Manager complements your existing established processes by seamlessly integrating into your organization's workflow, thereby enhancing overall efficiency and reducing the risk of errors or delays.Post-award reporting & monitoring impact
SmartSimple's Research Grants Management System empowers funders to effectively track and communicate the outcomes of their research investments. With versatile reporting capabilities, interactive data visualization, and geospatial impact mapping, funders can better quantify and showcase the impact of their research programs, fostering transparency and informed decision-making.
Versatile and powerful reporting
- With SmartSimple, you can easily manage all your reporting needs, from basic ad hoc queries to highly complex reports requiring granular details. The system's robust reporting engine, Report Builder Neo, empowers you to create customized reports that can be shared and exported.
- All your data within SmartSimple's Cloud for Research Grants Management is reportable, giving you unparalleled visibility across all your research projects. You can quantify your achievements by reporting on any outcomes-based data point, providing funders with accurate and comprehensive insights into research impact.
- The system's reporting capabilities enable funders to track research outcomes and key performance indicators (KPIs) efficiently, making it easier to assess the success of funded projects and communicate these achievements effectively.
Interactive data visualization and dashboards
- SmartSimple's Research Dashboard offers configurable, interactive dashboards that bring your KPIs to life. These dashboards empower collaborators, awardees, and scientific board members with real-time, data-driven summaries of the metrics that matter most to them.
- Stakeholders can drill down into real-time research program data, ensuring that everyone involved is well-informed and focused on achieving the predefined outcomes. These dynamic dashboards provide a clear and visual representation of the progress of research projects.
- Interactive data visualization tools allow funders to convey their achievements accurately, enhancing transparency and communication with stakeholders.
Geospatial impact mapping
- SmartSimple's Impact Map, powered by Google Maps, offers a powerful and interactive way to visualize the outcomes of your research investments. Geotags are used to map collective outcomes, showing where all research funds have been allocated.
- Funders can filter by grant type, research program, or date to examine progress and share specific details such as grant amounts, highly qualified personnel (HQP) or full-time equivalents (FTE), and more. This feature provides a comprehensive and visual representation of research impact.
- The ability to zoom in on every metric and filter results based on various criteria offers endless possibilities for funders to gain insights into the geographical distribution and the overall impact of their research funding.
Budget management
SmartSimple's Research Grants Management System empowers funders to manage their financial commitments effectively and efficiently. With features such as streamlined disbursements, flexible budget allocation, and comprehensive financial reporting, funders can maintain control over their budgets and make informed decisions to support their research initiatives.
Flexible budget allocation
- SmartSimple's Fund Manager enables funders to allocate funds from multiple sources for a single grant payment, offering flexibility and versatility when managing budgets. This feature is particularly useful for programs with co-funding from various sources.
- You can easily coordinate disbursements from multiple funding sources, allowing for customized payment allocation per source. This ensures that funds are utilized efficiently and in accordance with the specific terms of each funding source.
- The system provides complete visibility over the entire audit trail across all funding sources, making it easy to view approved and disbursed payments by grantee and track disbursement details by transaction.
Efficient disbursement and payment control
- With SmartSimple's Fund Manager, you can streamline disbursements while having the flexibility to manage ad-hoc payments, ensuring that grant payments are made promptly and efficiently.
- The Fund Manager's payment scheduling capabilities allow you to automate the arrangement of all grant payments. You can easily set the payment amounts and dates, reducing manual payment processing and potential errors.
- Funders gain control over the flow of payments through status changes, ensuring that all payments are tracked and recorded accurately. This feature simplifies the disbursement process, promoting transparency and accountability.
Comprehensive financial reporting
- SmartSimple's Fund Allocation Chart allows funders to gain a comprehensive view of the entire financial landscape. This chart offers insights into approved and disbursed payments by grantee within each grantee record.
- You can also view aggregate disbursements by funding area, remaining fund balances, and detailed disbursement information by transaction. This level of reporting ensures that funders have a clear and detailed understanding of their financial commitments and can make informed decisions.
- The system allows funders to track leveraged funds for disbursement payments that are matched by outside funders, enabling a comprehensive view of the financial impact of their grants.
Success with SmartSimple Cloud
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The team really listened when we talked about what we needed our system to do. They didn’t offer a generic, out-of-the-box product. Instead, they presented an adaptable, comprehensive solution that answered our specific needs.
Sydney Yovic
Associate Vice President of Research Operations & Mission
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SmartSimple definitely had the most flexible platform on the market. The competition only offered ‘out of the box’ solutions, while SmartSimple’s presentation showed us not only the functionality of their software, but the passion and commitment to shaping the system we wanted.
Donal Keane
COO, Science Foundation Ireland
Manage all your research grantmaking and business processes on one grant tracking system with seamless integrations
We know that no organization uses just one tool or one application anymore. That’s why we’ve integrated the most used applications by grantmakers. So whether you want to simplify grantee registration, sign a document, or map out your grants by location, you can do it all within our research grants management software.
By seamlessly connecting various systems and tools within a unified ecosystem, we empower businesses to leverage these integrations, with benefits of productivity, efficiency and data-driven decision making.
ORCID
- Effortless data import: Users can automatically import their research details, publications, citations, grants, and employment information into the system. This significantly reduces the time and effort required to input this data manually.
- Seamless updates: Any changes or updates to funding information within SmartSimple Cloud are automatically reflected in the user's ORCID record. This ensures that their profile is always up to date without the need for manual adjustments.
- Time and error savings: Researchers benefit from a streamlined application process, greatly reducing the time it takes to complete grant applications. Furthermore, the integration minimizes the risk of manual data entry errors during this process, improving the accuracy and efficiency of applications.
PubMed
- Efficient literature review: Users can seamlessly access PubMed's vast repository of biomedical and life science literature. This integration streamlines the process of conducting literature reviews, making it easier to identify relevant research and incorporate it into grant proposals.
- Enhanced data accuracy: With direct integration, users can easily import and cite PubMed references and abstracts in their grant applications. This not only improves the accuracy of citations but also reduces the risk of manual errors.
- Time and Productivity Savings: By eliminating the need to switch between different platforms, users save valuable time and effort. This results in increased productivity and a smoother grant application experience.
Our research grants software helps people help people.
Our new AI features makes it simpler than ever.
Discover the future of research grants management with SmartSimple Cloud +AI. Our innovative features streamline application processes, enhance decision-making, and increase transparency, all powered by advanced AI technology.
Assisted Application Screening
SmartSimple Cloud +AI enhances grant application screening for better efficiency, fairness, and quicker decisions.
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